


of unknown origins

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate History, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Past Lives, Past Relationship(s), spy feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 15:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7228051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s been smiling since she sat down, a little coy because it’s the show they’re putting on – and a little earnest, because after four years of mutually imposed estrangement they still feel inexorable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	of unknown origins

**Author's Note:**

> A crossover in which both the Avengers and UNCLE exist. Which means it's a wonky timeline, but given that fandom is magical, I can just do this *waves hands mysteriously* and everything is good and beautiful. That said, the events of the fic fall at the end of CA:TWS, so it would be useful, though not entirely necessary, to remember what happened there.

“ _– Congressional hearings are underway on the recent implosion of the covert counterterrorism agency known as the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, gathering top officials from Defense and State Departments to assess the state of U.S. national security and accountability for the deaths of dozens of agents including SHIELD director, Nicholas Fury, who –_ ”

“You think HYDRA really put Fury in the ground?”

Illya looks over at Napoleon, who’s emerged from upstairs freshly showered, curls a mess and still dripping a little down his neck, sweatpants slung indecently low on his hips because he never gets tired of testing Illya’s self-control. Coincidentally, Illya likes pretending he’s not shamelessly easy, probably more than he should.

“Every agent worth his salt knows no one can put Fury in the ground.”

“Don’t let Waverly hear you say that.” Napoleon flops down on the couch. He stole Illya’s shampoo again; Illya can _smell_ it.

“Waverly needs to pull the stick out of his behind and learn to play well with others.”

“Ass. You can say ass, you know, it won’t jeopardize your virtue.” Napoleon peers at him sideways, equal parts amused and fond. “You and Captain America really should be bffs.”

He shoots Napoleon a pained look before turning back to the TV, and as he watches footage from early that morning of Natasha Romanov ascending the steps of Capitol Hill, he says, “Captain America probably needs to work through a few trust issues first.”

*

“ _It’s me. Let’s talk. Some place quiet with a view, for old times’ sake. You still owe me that drink,_ solnyshko.”

*

The rooftop bar in Midtown is a heady mix of modernity, old world opulence, and exoticism that would’ve made Illya uncomfortable, once, fiddle with his cuffs up until the second he crossed the threshold to leave and felt like he could breathe again. Now he can almost say he enjoys it in moderation, and the blame lies entirely with Napoleon because this – the high back wing chairs, the lush upholstery, the gilded frames – is right up his alley.

“Stark’s tastes are rubbing off on you.” Illya turns from the glittering 24th-storey view to Natasha, who’s devastating in red lace with a high neckline and a plunging back, hair shorter than he likes but it suits her, in this life.

She’s been smiling since she sat down, a little coy because it’s the show they’re putting on – and a little earnest, because after four years of mutually imposed estrangement they still feel inexorable.

“Can’t a girl treat herself once in a while? Besides – the world-saving, the spandex, the conspiracies. Gets a little tiring. I was looking for a change of scenery.” 

Illya knows that means more than a view of the skyline and a bottle of Moët, so he says, “UNCLE could use someone with your skill set.”

“UNCLE already has someone with my skill set,” she smiles, forbearing because she knows he’s offering out of a sense of duty drilled too deep to unlearn, not some stupidly nurtured hope that there’s a way back for them. “I prefer to find my own way. That’s not why I’m here.”

“You need information.”

She leans in with her forearms on the table, spine a sinuous curve, lashes dipping low, beckoning. Illya remembers those first few months in Moscow, when she was the girl from Volgograd trying to make something out of nothing, acting on orders to seduce her husband, and her sweetness still far outweighed her guile.

“What do you know about the Winter Soldier program?” she murmurs.

He leans in and takes her hand, pressing it against his mouth. He anticipated this, too, but it doesn’t make the question sit any easier.

“I know it’s a rabbit hole you don’t want to go down.” Even with his standing in the KGB it was only hearsay. Secret laboratories five levels below ground and men in the business of death and resurrection.

“Rogers – he’s looking for answers and I owe him one,” Natasha says, with the kind of bloody-mindedness that used to save Illya and nearly kill him all in one day, that held her back – or spared her – from being an asset the KGB would rather eliminate than lose.

“This is more than paying a debt.”

She starts pulling away and he lets her go, knowing it’s not only that old habits die hard, it’s also just exceedingly simple, and painless, to make it all a matter of accounting. That what they didn’t expect after a decade of being engineered to feel nothing was that they’d feel _too much_ , like breaking through the surface after being drowned and sucking in breaths that, for an interminable moment, make living harder than dying.

“He’s a good man,” she finally says, staring out the window at the crawl of headlights down Broadway. “Traitors, killers, heroes, martyrs, I’ve seen them all. But Steve – he takes me by surprise every time. And the thing is, he doesn’t even have to try. He just walks around with his morals on his sleeve, so goddamn trusting like the world doesn’t keep letting him down, and you’re crazy enough to think some of that could rub off on you if you stick around long enough.”

She turns to Illya again, mouth poised and eyes unmoved, as if she didn’t just confess for the first time to wanting to be fixed against all odds, and Illya would act in kind and say he wishes it was something in his power to give, but he’s always hated hollow gestures.

So instead he says, “I know a guy in Kiev.”

*

“I’m sorry – you were _married_ to Black Widow?”

Napoleon blinks at Illya from across the bedroom in the middle of picking out a tie, shirt still untucked, collar askew, feet bare against the carpet.

“Married. Past tense,” he says, but Napoleon doesn’t look appeased. “It was professional, not personal. Traveling as a couple draws less attention. The KGB were nothing if not efficient.”

Napoleon’s silent for a while as he buttons his collar, and then his cuffs.

“Did you – do you have – ”

“No. No children,” he says shortly, meeting that fine line between evading the truth and telling a lie, but Napoleon doesn’t push, just starts tying his tie like nothing between them has been jarred out of place.

“By all accounts, the Winter Soldier program is a myth that’s stuck around because the Internet loves a good conspiracy theory. If any part of it were true, don’t you think it would’ve surfaced by now?”

“If there was a secret the KGB wanted buried, it would stay buried,” Illya says grimly, fastening his watch around his wrist.

“Which means no one should go digging for it, least of all you.” Napoleon’s jaw is set, twitching, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t try to knock some sense into Illya, knowing a losing battle when he sees one and being, unequivocally, the kind of man who never bloodies his fists for the sake of trying. Which isn’t to say he ever throws away an opportunity to get in his two cents’ worth.

“Contrary to what you might like to think,” Illya says, retrieving Napoleon’s tie clip from the nightstand, “I’m a pretty damn good spy.”

He walks over, running two fingers down Napoleon’s tie – red with a tiny cobalt flower pattern, bought on a solo mission in Dubai the first time Illya admitted to _missing_ him – before slipping the clip in place.

Napoleon curls a loose, warm hand around his wrist. “Only when you’re not busy being an idiot.”

Illya raises an eyebrow. “Pot, kettle.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Napoleon smiles, daring him to try to get in the last word, and he just says, “We’re running late.” 

He turns to grab his jacket, which is when Napoleon’s hand tightens around his wrist, keeping him in place.

“You can tell me. Whoever you were before, whatever still keeps you up at night. All the skeletons rattling in your closet. You can show me. I won’t run,” Napoleon says, beautifully, aggravatingly tenacious, holding onto Illya like this is a sure thing.

And if Illya were a better man he’d say okay. He’d let all those skeletons loose, and then he’d tell Napoleon to _run_. He knew there was no distinguishing between monsters and men long before Banner, only it wasn’t mass destruction he wrought, it was lives he unraveled, one by one, and then called it patriotism. He’d say what keeps him up at night is all the red in his ledger he can’t wipe out because there’s no repaying the dead.

But there’s something hardwired in him that’s rotten by design, so he just presses Napoleon’s hand against his mouth and holds on.

*

He sleeps straight through his red-eye to Kiev, long inured to the tedium of flying, the steady whine of the turbofan, the lack of a profound difference between airline seating and solitary confinement.

Everything he’s brought fits neatly in his pockets: wallet, passport, phone, and a thumb-sized radio transmitter, standard-issue for agents in the field, technically for official use only but Napoleon had planted himself between Illya and the front door and glared until he conceded.

It should go without a hitch – a bloodless transaction between ex-KGB with a short but amicable history of trading favors – but he picks up a Glock, from a small-time dealer in Pechersk, because he likes the weight of a firearm tucked against his back.

He waits for Oleg on a bench at the foot of St. Andrew’s, staring up at its dome and spires, dipped in the color of jade, and remembers the first time he set foot in Kiev, with Natasha by his side, tasked with cutting out the heart of the Verkhovna Rada, and, when they had finished, standing in the sanctuary of the church, tempting God’s wrath.

In the end he returns the Glock, bullets unused. When he flies straight to D.C. and steps onto American soil again, he has a wallet, a passport, a phone, a passive radio transmitter, and a briefcase.

He hails a cab to drive him to the rendezvous point. Arlington National Cemetery, Section 60. They roll past rows and rows of uniformly cut tombstones, meticulously laid over swaths of verdant green, accompanied more often than not by an American flag. Here lie men of honor, willing warriors in the fight for freedom from tyranny.

When they stop, there’s a black town car already parked, a little obtrusive for his tastes but no one’s around to flag it as suspicious this early on a Tuesday.

He smells Natasha’s perfume even before he slides in the back – floral and sweet. ( _It’s the tastes, the smells they can’t scrub off you. Like lavender and honeysuckle. I take a deep long breath and just for a moment, I find something they stole from me. I can’t see it, but I know._ )

“I take it there were no problems,” she says, eyes sliding down the length of him, “no bullet holes.”

“Once upon a time we would’ve called that a disappointment,” he says, resetting the lock on the briefcase before handing it over.

Natasha sets it in her lap, watching him with something he’d mistake for nostalgia if he didn’t know better, if they hadn’t been ready to repudiate everything, including each other, for the sake of starting again. 

“Those are expectations I’ve happily adjusted, believe me,” she says before looking past his shoulder, making him turn.

Through the tinted window, they watch Rogers wend his way across the grounds, Wilson two paces behind.

“Fury must really be enjoying this,” Illya says casually. “Hiding in plain sight, not paying taxes, seeing who lines up to grieve, and who doesn’t. It’s an ingenious way to learn who your real friends are.”

When he glances back at Natasha, she’s smiling like he should remember this is a game he never wins.

“Director Fury saw the light and walked towards it. As for what happened after, your guess is as good as mine. Knowing him, it’s probably one hell of a party.”

Rogers is saying something to Wilson, hands in his pockets, head bowed, and from where they’re sitting he doesn’t look like a super soldier, or a hero; he just looks tired, as if the harder he tries to hold the world together, the more it falls apart.

“You care about them. About Rogers. You trust him with your life,” Illya says suddenly, and for once Natasha looks wrong-footed, hemmed in and disarmed by the truth.

“Yes,” she concedes, swallowing everything she would’ve said once to hedge her bets.

He reaches over to grip her fingers, because it hurts like hell hearing it out loud, knowing for certain now that were they to follow the tangled thread back to their provenance, they’d never find anything so pure and simple. He imagines that’s the thing about knowing, and feeling: the wider your world opens, the more it shows you about the nature of things ugly and beautiful, and things meant to be endured.

“It’s new,” Natasha adds, squeezing his hand. “Terrifying. But – nice. To have people.”

Illya doesn’t say, _you have me_ , because it doesn’t need to be said, and that’s the thing about having had one person and one crusade be your entire world.

“Now I need to go give a guy some answers, before they burn a hole through this briefcase.”

And before she gets out of the car, she leans over and kisses him, feather-soft, on the corner of his mouth, rubbing a little at the spot with her thumb afterward.

“Given all my hard work, the least you can do is talk Stark into sharing some of his tech,” he calls out after her.

When she pops back in his line of sight, hand on the door, she’s smiling again, radiant, and too smug by half.

“I can kick Stark’s ass six ways to Sunday, doesn’t mean he listens to me. You’re on your own with this one, _solnyshko_.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _solnyshko_ \-- Russian term of endearment that means sunshine.
> 
> Verkhovna Rada - Ukraine's parliament. 
> 
> The marriage-as-a-cover idea was inspired by The Americans. The mini radio transmitter idea was shamelessly stolen from Skyfall. So many spies, SO LITTLE TIME.


End file.
